Wednesday, June 15, 2005

"This wine may contain traces of fish products"

I bought a lovely-sounding New Zealand wine called Sacred Hill Whitecliff Sauvignon Blanc. I brought it home and was putting it away, when I noticed in small letters on the back label: "This wine may contain traces of fish products"

WTF? How do fish products get into wine?

I sent the winery a polite and curious email. Hopefully they'll respond. I'm going to have to take the wine back, but I'm more curious than anything else.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Things They Should Invent: Nicotine-only cigarettes

Is it really strictly necessary to have tar and arsenic etc. in cigarettes? Why can't they just make them pure nicotine, without as many cancer-causing chemicals?

The humidity has broken!

The post-apocalyptic dystopian heat wave is over!!!! WOOO!

Monday, June 13, 2005

Fido voice-recognition sucks!

Fido switched to a voice-recognition menu rather than a push-button menu for upgrading accounts. But their voice recognition SUCKS! It doesn't recognize my voice at all! It doesn't recognize me saying the word "Yes". And I have a Standard Canadian accent (Fido is a Canadian company) and English is my first language! What really sucks is that you can't even push the buttons for the push-button system, so I'm stuck waiting for an agent! BOO FIDO! Bring back the press one press two system!

Edited to make this post actually useful: If Fido voice recognition doesn't work for you, try the following:

1. Call from a landline instead of your cell.
2. If you're a woman, get a man to do it. (In general, voice-recognition software tends to like men better). If you don't have a man handy, pretend to be a man.
3. If you can manage to speak to an agent, tell them, in your best Standard Canadian accent, that the voice recognition doesn't understand you.
4. Go to www.fido.ca, click on the "Contact us" link, and send them a message telling them that the voice recognition doesn't understand you.

I don't know what they'll tell you to help you because they haven't emailed me back, but perhaps a critical mass of people who can't use the voice recognition will help change their minds.

Sunday, June 12, 2005

Hope Estate Chardonnay

I don't much like this wine, because it has the element that is common to
cantaloupe and pink lemonade, and I don't like this particular element. It
might be a perfectly good wine, I have no idea. I just can't enjoy it for
the same reason I can't enjoy a fruit salad that' s heavy on the cantaloupe.

Note to self

- Disabling Norton Internet Security and allowing supplementary modification of the address bar works. The question is which of these is the key element?

- The emails you need are in your gmail so you don't have to worry about transferring them.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Bellylicious?

I've noticed lately that there are quite a few girls who walk around in low-rise pants with their midriffs exposed, despite the fact that they have a bit of a belly and this fashion choice results in their exposed belly sticking out over their pants.

I rather hope this becomes fashionable, maybe even considered sexy.

Not that I want to go around exposing my belly myself (it's just more skin that I have to worry about being hair- and zit-free), but despite my best efforts and my ability to do 200 good-quality situps without breaking stride, my belly really wants to stick out and tends to bloat at the slightest provocation. It would make my life so much easier if this was considered sexy and attractive, maybe moving us more in the general direction of an goddess model of female attractiveness, like they had in ancient matriarchal societies, where extra flesh was desireable when carried in areas where it signified fertility. (Not that I want to be fertile either, but my ovaries seem to have other plans).

The mainstreaming of the concept of bootylicious did quite a bit of good for my body image. Maybe bellylicious will be next?

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Marketing prodigies!

Suppose you're a horny teenager and you want to have cybersex. How would you make this sound like a good decision to various meddling grownups?

Call it the Safe Sex Club!

I hope someone tracks down these kids and hires them for their branding department!

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

New computer!

Dell Dimensions come in a big box that weighs 25 lbs. Carrying it one block home is a bit much, so I took a $4 taxi ride.

It took me 2.5 hours to save all the information on my old comp, configure the old comp so the LCD monitor would work with it (so I can get rid of the CRT), open the boxes, set up the new computer, set up my internet connection, and download and configure all the necessary software.

Things I still have to do at my leisure:

1. Figure out how to edit the startup list in Windows XP
2. Figure out how to convince Outlook to download messages that are more than one month old.
3. Figure out how to get Outlook to leave the damn messages on the server when it downloads them, and hope to hell I can get them to go back on the server because I download messages automatically but sometimes I want to check my email when not at home! GAH!
4. Failing that, figure out how to transfer emails from the old comp to the new comp.
5. Figure out how to automatically schedule maintenance operations.

But now I'm getting hungry and grumpy, so I'm going to have some food and read my newspapers.

Monday, June 06, 2005

Brilliant Ideas that will Never Work: deal-breaker personal ads

Usually in a personal ad, people write some good things about themselves and some good things about what they want in a mate.

They should invent personal ads that take the exact opposite approach. In a deal-breaker personal ad, you list everything about yourself that you think could be an unexpected dealbreaker, and everything that would be a dealbreaker in a mate. Then when browsing the personal ads, if people find an ad where they have none of the mate-dealbreakers and they can tolerate all the dealbreakers of the people who wrote the ad, they can click through and find out more information.

The dealbreakers shouldn't be things like occupation and appearance, but rather annoying personality quirks and unshakeable convictions - things that you really cannot let slide.

For example, if I were making a deal-breaker personal ad, I might write something like:
Shy, introverted, atheist female, severely arachnophobic, doesn't want kids, doesn't drive and intends to live in the city forever. Seeking man who can kill spiders, is willing to sit up with me when I've had a panic attack, and doesn't mind that I won't kiss him until I'm in love with him. Right-wingers and people with facial hair need not apply.
Then all the annoying quirks are out of the way at the outset, so you don't have to go through all the trouble of growing attached to someone only to find that their dream home is a tiny highrise condo.

What to do now that In Shape with Sharon Mann seems to have been cancelled

If anyone stumbling upon this through Google is wondering what to do now that W Network seem to have cancelled In Shape with Sharon Mann, Outdoor Life Network has a show called the Caribbean Workout on at the same time. I'm not sure what's Caribbean about it other than the fact that it seems to be gratuitously filmed in the Barbados. I did it today and got far sweatier than I normally do with Sharon Mann. I'm not sure if this is because the workout is harder or because it's hotter outside. The camera operator has an annoying habit of sometimes not showing their legs when they're showing new choreography, but I don't know whether this is actually worse than Sharon Mann - I've been doing Sharon Mann for almost two years so I've gotten used to her choreography. I'll write further about it later this week, assuming that in this weather I actually manage to convince myself to exercise more than one day.

As for a substitute for Breathingspace Yoga, the only one I've been able to find is Lilias on PBS, but it's only Mondays and Wednesdays and half an hour earlier than Breathingspace.

Computer update

So I never ended up actually calling Dell. I stumbled upon a page with all the computer's specs, and that answered all my questions about the computer itself.

That only left questions about how it shipped. But I have an unrelated situation that one of my parents is going to have to help me with, so I arranged for them to come over (with the car) at a time when, if the delivery of the computer didn't work out, the computer would be at a courier depot waiting for me to pick it up. So worst case I could have my parents go about half an hour out of their way and drive me to pick up the computer.

Then in my usual decision-making strategy, which is to fret and fuss until I reach my maximum tolerance for worrying, then throw up my hands and make a decision, any decision, I ordered my computer on Wednesday evening. At the very last minute, I decided to upgrade my videocard to an Nvidia Geforce. A bit extremisch, I know, but I wasn't 100% certain the ATI Raedon would last me five years, and the Nvidia was only $200 to upgrade, but retails for close to $500. So now my new computer will have a videocard with more memory than my entire old computer, which is a bit ridiculous.

Turns out I needn't have worried about shipping. I had been frantically and fruitlessly Googling for "dell canada shipping courier" "How does Dell Canada ship?" "Dell Canada shipping Toronto" etc., so here is the answer: In midtown Toronto, Dell Canada ships by Purolator. Dell Canada might also ship by Purolator in other parts of Canada, I have no way of knowing, but in midtown Toronto they ship by Purolator. This is extremely convenient for me since there is a depot point just a block from my home, and I can easily carry this computer one block.

So I ordered the computer last Wednesday, and it shipped last Friday, which was 10 days before the estimated ship date (although they might be using the Scotty method to calculate their ship dates).

I also figured out how to convert my ICQ history to text files. In ICQ 2001b (yes, I never upgrade unless strictly necessary) you just open the history in question, click on "Save As..." and it will let you save it as a .txt file. So you do have to do every user separately, but it's rather straight-forward. So my histories have been converted and stashed in my gmail account, which makes the idea of data transfer problems a lot less terrifying.

So that's my story :) Further updates if warranted when my new comp. is delivered and up and running.

Sunday, June 05, 2005

Humiliating TV characters

On television comedies, a lot of the time characters make a fool of themselves or embarrass themselves. I don't like this that much - it makes me feel embarrassed for them and vaguely uncomfortable, and often if there's too much of this I mute the TV or turn off the show. I know that some humiliation of characters is sometimes necessary for plot purposes or comedy purposes or even schadenfreude purposes, but some shows humiliate their characters far more than is strictly necessary. Do some viewers actively enjoy watching characters be humiliated?

Things They DID Invent!

A while ago (I can't find the post, but I'm certain I wrote it) I blogged that someone should invent isolated elements of wine-tasting (like fruity, floral, tannic, etc.) to help amateur wine connoisseurs identify the elements in a particular wine.

Well, guess what? Someone invented just that!

Acquainted with the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark by Christopher Dewdney

This book is all about night. Strange concept, eh? The author discusses night from almost ever perspective imaginable: meteorology, astronomy, history, art, literature, botany, zoology, technology... He talks about the history of streetlamps and different kinds of twilight and the relationship between a cricket's chirp and the ambient temperature and strange deep-sea creatures and prehistoric arctic life and the formation of the earth and all kinds of other things, all of it related to the central theme of night. From my description it sounds like some crazy over-ambitious lit. essay, but it's very interesting and remarkably easy to read! Read this if you want to feel smart.

Saturday, June 04, 2005

"Gravy ain't wavy"?

Can anyone help me understand this comic?

The guy in question is a total cad. The woman he's talking to is irrelevant to understanding this particular strip. Edda is a girl the guy is interested in, but she's not at all interested in him because he's a total cad, and she might be too young for him anyway, and might also be in love with someone else.

The problem is I have no idea what "Gravy ain't wavy" means or refers to. Can anyone help?

Friday, June 03, 2005

Fun with computers & math & other geeky stuff

What's fun is taking the specs of my old computer from 1999 and the specs of my new computer (I did order one, more on that later), and mathematically extrapolating to predict the specs of my next computer, which I shall be purchasing around the age of 30.

I came up with about 10 gigs of memory, 20 Ghz processor, 1 gig videocard, and 1 terabyte of storage.

Isn't that just downright terrifying?

Separated at birth?

Anyone else think that the recent courtroom sketches of Karla Homolka bear a striking resemblance to Belinda Stronach?

Thursday, June 02, 2005

Statements about myself that people regularly dispute

Generally if one says something about oneself, other people will believe it. After all, who knows us better than we know ourselves? So if I say that my hair tends not to hold a curl or I don't like peas or I can't lift a certain heavy item, people will generally take me at my word. But there are a few things that people frequently do not believe. It's not just a "Don't be silly, those pants look great on you!" kind of self-esteem-boosting protest, people actually try to debate me, to convince me through some sort of logic that I'm wrong.

So here, for your amusement, is a list of frequently-contested statements about myself:

- Chocolate gives me headaches
- It generally takes me two hours to fall asleep at night
- I can translate at a professional level in only one direction and language combination, and cannot interpret consecutively at a professional level, or simultaneously at all
- I am not suited to be an engineer because I am not detail-oriented, have poor kinesthetic skills, and have no sense of aesthetic or practical design
- Both white and off-white are unflattering colours on me
- I wear a size 14
- Feces don't bother me, but vomit does
- I have no desire to work in a supervisory capacity
- I like dogs but not cats
- I hate travelling